In Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s Novel, a Political Cartoonist Answers to the Past

“The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.” So says a character in “The Sound of Things Falling,” a 2011 novel by the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez. It’s a straightforward but debatable claim. Lies before they are revealed, after all, provide the comfort of false certainty, while lies exposed offer another kind of certainty: villainous and tragic, yes, sometimes even life-shattering. But what if memory itself is inherently uncertain — what if, like Schrödinger’s cat, it is only superposition of what happened and what could have happened? There is no point then in seeking Newtonian clarity in any memory; impossible, really.

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the White Queen famously tells Alice, in a line that the protagonist of Vásquez’s new novel, “Reputations,” cites often. That quotation is a key to the book, and also — exhilaratingly — a direct challenge to “The Sound of Things Falling,” which had much to do with going backward in memory.

“Reputations” opens with the crowning of a rebel. Javier Mallarino is a famous political cartoonist — his attention is feared or hated by his subjects, yet secretly desired. “To be caricatured by Javier Mallarino is to have a political life,” one government minister explains. “The politician who disappears from his drawings no longer exists.” Called the nation’s moral authority, he has been threatened with legal action and violence. After 40 years, he is finally embraced by the establishment, his self-portrait issued as the newest stamp. Nothing works more efficiently in turning a man into a caricature than fame, and Mallarino is no exception. Years of hiding — away from Bogotá and behind his drawings — give way to his new life on a pedestal. A harmless encounter allows a moment of idle lust for a young woman; a night with his ex-wife, who divorced him when he chastised her for no longer admiring him, rekindles the hope of reunion.

Triumph and happiness — it’s in such a state that Mallarino is approached by ­Samanta Leal. Twenty-eight years earlier she was his daughter’s playmate, and at a party he hosted, the two girls, 7 years old and unsupervised, drank dregs from whiskey and rum around the house. They were left to sleep off their drunkenness, and an unwelcome guest — a congressman — was suspected to have molested Samanta.

Did the attack happen, or did it only occur in the imagination of Samanta’s father? Minutes before the alleged crime, Mallarino, observing the congressman, “saw his ears, his nose, the bones of his forehead and temples, and thought of the strange disdain those bones and cartilage produced in him, and said to himself that even if Adolfo Cuéllar didn’t strike him as a repugnant little character, he would keep drawing him nonstop, and his bones and cartilage were to blame.” Mallarino’s parenting blunder and the congressman’s ill reputation and suspicious behavior, in the end, aren’t the cartoonist’s chief concerns: “Bones are the only things that matter; in them, in the shape of the skull and the angle of the nose, in the width of the forehead and the strength or trepidation of a jaw and the dimples on a chin, their delicate or brusque slopes, their more or less intense shadows, there lies the reputation and the image: Give me a bone and I shall move the world.”

“Reputations” is driven by a similar quest as that in “The Sound of Things Falling,” though with a murkier and more agitating premise. In the earlier novel, fabrication was presented to one character as memory, so revisiting the past seemed a sensible decision — because on the opposite side of fabrication there is always a factual version. In “Reputations,” the quest, initiated by Samanta out of curiosity, is taken over by Mallarino, but for what reason? To sabotage his own reputation, to rebel against the fame that turns him into a caricature or simply to keep a young woman hostage because he claims the power to restore her erased memory?

“This is . . . hell. Not knowing is not hell. The hellish thing is not knowing whether I want to know,” Samanta says toward the end of the novel, begging Mallarino to stop their pursuit. Not knowing allows memory to go on as Schrödinger’s cat, yet that does not gratify Mallarino. Given the glorious end of his career, learning whether he wrongly accused a man in his cartoon and caused him a painful death could be a moral issue. It is not morality, however, that concerns Mallarino, but that he has arrived at a position where “one’s memory works both ways,” as the White Queen states. (Is Mallarino, crowned in the opening chapter, not the White Queen to Samanta, the confused Alice?) By redefining Samanta’s past he is working not only backward but forward too: This moment will become her memory, from which he will never be excluded.

If there is one sure violation in the novel, it is Mallarino’s departure from his art to make Samanta his end-of-career subject. A caricaturist relies on past events that are not yet forgotten; Mallarino’s design for Samanta is to create for her future something unforgettable. The novel’s brilliance is that we, wanting to know what happened to that sleeping girl, become Mallarino’s accomplices; the novel’s genius is that we, greedy for certainty, become Mallarino’s prey. Like Samanta we are left with something unforgettable. In our case, it’s the chill and the pleasure in recognizing the impossibility and the inevitability of living with undefined memory: We want the cat alive or dead, but the cat refuses to oblige.

Vásquez’s fiction is far from the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism. “Literature is a question of method,” Vásquez has said. “Your job as a writer is to find the method that is best suited for the story you want to convey, the characters you want to conjure up.” If García Márquez is a master mixologist who grants us the sublimity of exuberant colors and unexpected tastes, Vásquez ­offers us a glass of water that looks deceivingly clear yet leaves lasting effect.

“Reputations” can be read and enjoyed on many levels: for its reflections on art, memory and fate; for its account of recent Colombian history at a slant, which is Vásquez’s trademark approach; for its Jungian exploration of lives intersecting. In fact, Carl Jung himself reportedly also loved the White Queen’s line about a poor memory working only backward, though Vásquez maybe overplays it here; by the quote’s third or fourth appearance in the novel, it starts to feel like shorthand, a small slip in a masterly book.

Anne McLean’s translation is elegant. Reading a text not in its original language, one still shivers when encountering sentences written and rendered with precision and beauty. Consider ­Mallarino’s daughter and Samanta at that party, “so drunk they were splayed out like pinned butterflies on the floor.” Or Mallarino — no longer the unseen artist — “leaning down toward the microphone, which suddenly looked like a fly’s compound eye.” And here, one of my favorite sentences: “Forgetfulness was the only democratic thing in Colombia: It covered them all, the good and the bad, the murderers and the heroes, like the snow in the James Joyce story, falling upon all of them alike.”

That sentence, like this novel as a whole, marks Juan Gabriel Vásquez as a Colombian writer working fully in the European tradition. Or maybe we can forgo geography altogether and just call him a true international writer.

Yiyun Li’s new book, “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life,” will be published in February.